More Stories

I coach, teach, and generally talk to a lot of writers. It is easy to view what we write the way we view our children: but for us these stories would never exist, and once we have raised them from a mere idea to a fully formed book, we send them out into the wide world to be read and have a life of their own. An author can no more control what a reader thinks and feels about the book he’s written than a father can control what his son’s friends think and feel about his son.

Authors worry as much if not more than your average parent. A common source of an author’s worry is the belief that it is possible, somehow, to perfect what he has written. Not merely improve, mind you, but actually perfect – choose the scenes, sentences, and words for which there is absolutely no alternative. There is no peace possible within this thought. Every book could be rewritten and rewritten until the end of time.

Children, on the other hand, are born perfect. To hold a newborn, who cannot walk or talk or conjugate a single verb, and view that little person as anything other than perfect requires an effort of the mind. In fact, the newborn’s perfection is beyond the mind’s understanding. The mind, ultimately, is responsible for life’s details, for distinguishing one thing from another so the heart can choose its preference. The newborn’s perfection is felt rather than understood in precisely the same way we feel our own perfection. To behold this perfection is to know peace, for there is nothing to be done or changed or corrected; everything is already as it should be.

It is easy to look in the mirror, as the mind counts the lines on our face or measures our nose and eyes against other noses and eyes, and forget that perfection, just as it is easy to look out our window and see a world of grossly imperfect people. We measure the violence and cruelty against what we have felt in our most peaceful moments, and the world comes up short. Children can be such a balm against that heartbreak. The parent can watch a child learn to walk where it wants to walk and say what it wants to say from within the perfection he first beheld before the child could make a single choice.

I have sat beside other young parents in the waiting rooms of neurologists and speech therapists and occupational therapists and felt the heartbreak for which we were unprepared. Though we may not have known it when we chose to have them, these children came in part to heal what we had seen in windows and mirrors as we made our way in the wide world. And now here we are, feeling robbed of the peace we’d barely had time to remember. In the place of this peace are all the choices we must make to somehow correct what appears to have arrived imperfect.​The best choice I have ever made for my son was to see him as perfect again. He did not always make this as easy as he did when I first held him, but the peace I have chosen since then has sustained me in ways that first perception could not. I know that words like peace can sound like empty platitudes against the hard, diagnostic reality of words like autism, but that is only because true perfection remains unbelievably constant. It will never be found within the words or careers or doctors we choose, but is rather the womb from which those choices are born.